Tuesday, April 29, 2014

BRITPOP DISSECTED #3 - the Britpress

BRITPOP AND THE BRITPRESSRequest, May 1996

by Simon Reynolds

Right now, the British weekly music press--New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker (MM)--is
going through one of its periodic phases of feeling self-important.
The reason, of course, is Britpop. The weeklies didn't create the
movement, but they did name it, and for two years now they've given
Britpop their unconditional support. The official line is that 'we've
never had it so good' (an echo of a famous political slogan from the
'60s); that Britpop is a golden age for UK music, and that if you want
to keep tabs on this fast-moving scene, you've got to buy the weeklies.

Grunge wasn't a bad time for the UK music press (in fact Melody Maker
was way ahead of American publications in picking up on what was happening in
Seattle). But the Brit-press is happiest when it can cover stuff happening
on
its own doorstep, on a week-by-week basis. If a band is local, it's so
much easier to kickstart the hype-cycle that so appals Americans: the
group's discovery at a live gig by a cub reporter ('I have seen the
future'), its endorsement by a more established writer, the granting of
'Single of the Week' honors, the pricking of major label A&R
interest, the full-page debut album rave, the front cover, and so forth.
So accelerated is the hype-cycle these days that stages are often
skipped; buzz bands sometimes make the front cover before they've even released a
record.

Being so USA-based, grunge interfered with this process. NME and MM rely on record companies to pay for trips outside the UK, which
means that most American bands are already signed by the time the press
write about it. Grunge also goaded the Britpress' patriotic pride,
triggering its reflex-resentment towards America's domination of pop culture. After
an initial anti-grunge backlash in '93 (Suede's defiantly Anglophile
blend of glam Bowie and glum Morrissey),Britpop really got rollin' in
'94. There was the neo-Merseybeat swagger of Oasis, Blur's unexpected
self-resurrection out of the 'has been/never-was' dumpster, and Pulp's
strange and wonderful ascent to cult popularity, after 15 years in the
wilderness. In '95, Britpop went into overdrive: Elastica, Supergrass,
Bluetones, Cast, Gene, Shed Seven, Menswear, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

The
Britpress will seize on any excuse for a fit of chest-swelling,
tub-thumping jingoism. Britpop was ideal, since its aesthetic base--the
mid-60's, filtered through its late '70s echo, New Wave--had hitherto
been strictly an indie style, and thus the province of the weeklies. At
the same time, Britpop bands are overtly anti-experimental and
pre-psychedelic; they combine a playsafe 1966-meets-1978, three minute
pop aesthetic with a doctrine of stardom-at-all-costs, making them
highly desirable to record companies and extremely radio-friendly.
Because the bands it deals with now hit the charts,
the prestige
and morale of the Britpress has been boosted; for the first time in 15
years, people turn to them as tipsheets on future stars. For instance,
this January a grubby little gang of sub-Oasis oiks called Northern
Uproar appeared on MM's cover one week, and on Top Of the Pops the next (TOTP
being the UK's premiere pop TV show, based around that week's new chart
entries). Furthermore, Britpoppers behave like pop stars; they make
strenuous efforts to give good face and good quote, all of which makes the music papers' job much easier.

That
job is basically to convince the readers that stuff is happening. Now,
you might think that ain't so hard, given the plethora of scenes and
sounds generated
by the merry postmodern tumult of the 1990's. But the Britpress
readership is deeply conservative, and its idea of what's relevant
is decidedly narrow. Look at the NME and MM annual readers polls in the last 15years and you'll invariably find the Best Band position occupied by
a white, all-male, British guitar band: the Jam, Echo & the
Bunnymen, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Suede, Blur, Oasis. The Top 10
Band, Album and Single categories usually feature no women, no blacks,
no dance music, and rarely any Yanks (although REM and Nirvana did
briefly challenge the Anglocentric bias).

The Britpress
has to give its readers what they want, i.e as many pieces as possible
on the 10 or so Big Brits (pegged around the single, the album, the
tour,
any excuse whatsoever basically), plus features on Brit-pop
'contenders'--younger bands waiting in the wings for fame and fortune to
take its toll on the established Brit biggies. That still leaves a
fair number of pages which have to be be filled by token coverage of
'minority' interests like techno, hip hop, weird guitar experimentalism,
American rock, and other stuff which market research shows the readers
are simply not interested in.

The big problem for the
weekly music papers right now is that the very commercial success that's
vindicated their Britpop boosterism is also making their own role
redundant. A few years ago, NME started its Brat Awards as a
sort of parody-cum-riposte to the Brit Awards (the UK record industry's
official, Grammy-like honors). In the beginning, NME could
justifiably argue that the truly vibrant pop of the day was being
ignored by the Brits, in favor of MOR artistes like Elton John and Phil
Collins, whose
awards were basically rewards for their contribution, via international
sales, towards rectifying Britain's trade deficit. These days, both
Brits and Brats are alarmingly similar in their fixation on the
triumvirate of Blur/Oasis/Pulp; yesterday's alternative has become
today's mainstream.

Because of this, everybody is writing about Britpop--from the newspapers and tabloids to glossy teenybop mags like Smash Hits.
With their traditional turf usurped by other mags and by TV, the
weeklies don't know where to go next, how to reclaim their unique role.
Do they carry on
scrabbling
to find the next Blur or Oasis ahead of the slower-moving monthly
magazines, a strategy which is already dredging up lame xeroxes and
runts-of-the-litter like Northern Uproar? Or do they dare to drift
left-field, and discover/dream up a new alternative?

Another
reason why the weekly papers have been obliged to narrow their focus is
the vast range of music media now available in the U.K., from
specialist publications (dance mags like Mixmag and Muzik, metal mags like Kerrang, cutting edge eclectics like The Wire) to the 'general interest' music monthlies like Select, Q and Mojo. The last three are owned by the publishing group EMAP, and are designed to take the reader from cradle to grave: Select is targetted at indie-loving teens and colledge kids, Q is for late twenty-to early thirtysomethings who buy maybe ten CD's a year, while Mojo is
a largely retro-oriented magazine aimed at the 30-plus market who've
given up on 'modern music' but are still passionately interested in the
graying rock'n'rollers who soundtracked their youth.

NME and Melody Maker are
deadly rivals, which is odd because they're owned by the same media
conglomerate, IPC, and are situated just one floor apart inside IPC's
King's Reach Tower.
Once upon a time, this emnity was based on
ideological differences. Today, the rivalry is sustained out of habit
more than anything; Britpop unites all in its engulfing mediocrity. In
truth, the papers have a complementary relationship. Since the late
'80s, MM has been ensconced in the role of discovering new bands first; the bigger-selling NME
bides its time and usually reaps the benefits of timing its coverage
closer to the point at which bands break into the mainstream.

Writing for a weekly music paper offers writers cachet and power, but
little financial reward or career prospects. There's a constant influx
of firebrands who arrive, make their mark (usually by crusading on
behalf of a particular scene or genre) and then burn out. There's a
definite type that's attracted to the weekly music press: almost always
male, almost always middle class, over-educated, a bit emotionally retarded. (I speak as someone who's written for Melody Maker for
ten years, and certainly don't exempt myself from this description!).
The Fall's Mark E. Smith tagged this breed with his phrase 'hip
priest'. Throbbing with will-to-belief and gifted in the arts of
messianic
rhetoric, these angsty young men gravitate towards the
music press, where in previous generations they might have chosen
revolutionary politics, poetry or evangelism.

See,
thriving (as opposed to eking out a living) in the Britpress requires a
weird sort of doublethink: the knack of participating in the conscious
construction
of a 'happening scene', while simultaneously believing in the reality
and righteousness of the figment you've created. A good example of this
syndrome is Romo, the pipe-dream of two of Melody Maker's brightest
journos,Simon Price and Taylor Parkes. Short for 'Romantic Modernism',
Romo is not, the duo stress, merely a revival of early '80s New
Romantic synth-and-eyeliner
pop, but "a renaissance" of the quintessentially English aptitude for
artifice and androgny. No matter that the one Romo band I've seen so
far, Viva, were quite dreadful, a cut-price Roxy Music; Price &
Taylor's manifesto-mongering and sheer will to hallucinate into being an
alternative to the increasingly prosaic Britpop are admirable. It's
what the English music press does best, and doesn't do often enough
these days.

British music hacks engage in this kind of scene-making partly for
glory, partly out of dissatisfaction with pop's stasis quo, and partly
in a purely generous attempt to make things seem more exciting than they
actually are. Ideas are thrown down, as a challenge and a
reproach, and in the hope that someone will pick up the baton. There's
no profit to be had from these crusades; only the bands who get signed
by majors thanks to the hacks's efforts, and the A&R scouts who
do the signing, make any money out of the hype-cycle.

The weekly nature of the Britpress, the sheer number of pages that
require filling, and the swarm of young egos hungry to make their
mark--all this contributes to the infamous "hothouse atmosphere" of the
UK music scene: the rapid turnover of scenes and styles, the histrionics and overheated prose.
The
readers don't particularly like these qualities, but they kinda expect
them; they're locked in a peculiar love/hate relationship with the
weeklies, and tend both to overestimate and underestimate their power. NME and MM
can't break bands on their own, without radio play, nor can they
significantly damage successful bands. But the papers do have a huge
influence on the record companies' A&R policy (several Romo
combos have already been signed!),
and a more subliminal effect on
British music culture itself. By creating a critical climate in which
certain ideas and attributes become highly charged, sexy, de rigeur, the
music papers shape the aesthetic universe in which a young band
develops; by the time they're getting written about, the bands are
spouting the buzzwords, dropping the references, reciting the litany.
Dreampop, the post-My Bloody Valentine wave of Lush, Slowdive, Ride,
etc, is a good example of this syndrome.

In the end, the Britpress's virtues are the same as its vices. It
is volatile, venomous, fickle, pretentious, lacking in perspective,
frothy with premature exaltations and disproportionate fervour, absurdly
polarised in its judgements, prey to the most pernicious kinds of
boosterism, and an utter stranger to fact-checking. Wholly un-American,
in other words.